Worker Placement

"Wendake" is the name that the Wyandot People use for their traditional territory. This population, also known as the Huron Nation, lived in the Great Lakes region together with the Iroquois, Shawnee, Potomac, Seneca, and many others. In this game, you explore the traditions and everyday life of these tribes during the 1756-1763 period when the Seven Years War between the French and the English took place in these territories.

But this white man's war is really only a marginal aspect of the game; the focus is on life in the Native villages, fields, and forests. In this game, you won't find the traditional teepees since those were used by southwestern tribes who moved their camps to follow the herds of buffalo. The Natives of the Great Lakes were sedentary, living in long houses. The women farmed beans, corn, and pumpkins, while men hunted beavers in the forests, mainly to sell their pelts as leather.

In the game Wendake, you are placed in the shoes of a chief of a Native American tribe. You have to manage all of the most important aspects of their lives, earning points on the economic, military, ritual, and mask tracks. The core of the game is the action selection mechanism: You have the opportunity to choose better and better actions over seven game rounds, and the winner will be the player who can find the best combinations of actions and use them to lead their tribe to prosperity. Each player has their own 3x3 action board that is comprised of nine action tiles. The first time you select an action tile each year, you may choose any tile; the second and third times that year, you must choose another action tile in the same column, row, or diagonal as your previously selected tile(s). If the action tile you choose shows more than one action, you can use them only in the order shown, from top to bottom. After the last player has placed (and resolved) their fourth action marker, the restore phase begins.

During the restore phase, all players remove the action markers from their tiles and flip the tiles they used face down so that they show the opposite side. All players then move their action tiles down one row so that the top line of their action grid is empty and the three tiles from their bottom row are now outside of the grid; if any of these three tiles shows the ritual side, they must be flipped back to the action side. The first player may now set aside one of the three tiles below their grid and replace it with one of the six advanced action tiles near the board or with any action tile they already set aside in previous years. This new tile is added to the tiles below the player's grid. Then, whether a new tile was taken or not, they shuffle the three tiles that are below their grid and place them in random order on the top line of their grid, all showing the action side.

During the game, you score points in four tracks, with these tracks being coupled randomly at the beginning of the game. The game ends at the end of the seventh year, and for each pair of tracks, you score only the number of points indicated by the score marker on the lower value. Sum these points from the two pairs of score tracks to see who wins.

Die Säulen der Erde / The Pillars of the Earth is based on the bestselling novel by Ken Follett and the 2006 game in the Kosmos line of literature-based games.

At the beginning of the 13th century, construction of the greatest and most beautiful cathedral in England begins. Players are builders who try to contribute the most to this cathedral's construction and, in so doing, score the most victory points. Gameplay roughly consists of using workers to produce raw materials, and then using craftsmen to convert the materials into victory points. Workers may also be used to produce gold, the currency of the game. Players are also given three master builders each turn, each of which can do a variety of tasks, including recruiting more workers, buying or selling goods, or just obtaining victory points. Getting early choices with a master builder costs gold, as does purchasing better craftsmen. Players must strike a balance between earning gold to fund their purchases and earning victory points.

Expanded by:

The Pillars of the Earth Expansion Set (which include the Expansion Cards in some editions)
The Pillars of the Earth: Expansion Cards (which are included in the Expansion Set in some editions)

In Automania, you run a car factory, trying to produce the most popular cars in the market. To achieve this, you buy tiles to upgrade and customize your factory, and hire specialist employees to help you.

Central to the game are the factory boards: Each player has a factory with three assembly lines, and each assembly line produces one type of car. You can put machine tiles along your assembly lines to change the specifications of your cars. However, your three assembly lines intersect, so each machine tile placed might affect more than one type of car — which means you have to think carefully about where you put those machines.

When a car is produced, it must be sold in one of two markets, and the better the specifications of the car is in line with the demand in the chosen market, the more popular the car will be. The most popular cars reap the highest profits, earning money or prestige — which is what you need to win this game.

Designer Eric Lang, known for his "dudes on a map" games, describes The Godfather: Corleone's Empire — a standalone big box board game with high-quality miniatures — as "thugs on a map".

In short, the game is a streamlined, confrontational worker placement game filled with murder and intrigue. You play as competing mafia families who are vying for economic control of the organized crime networks of New York City, deploying your thugs, your don, your wife, and your heir on the board to shake down businesses and engage in area-control turf wars.

Money, rackets, contracts, and special advantages (such as the union boss) are represented by cards in your hand, and your hand size is limited, with you choosing which extra cards to pay tribute to the don at the end of each of the five rounds. At the end of the game, though, cash is all that matters, and whoever has the most money wins.

The game also features drive-by shootings in which enemy tokens are removed from the board and placed face-down in the river.

Description from the publisher:

It's the busiest time of the year at the North Pole, with only days to go until Santa leaves to make his yearly trip around the world! After his long night, and all the work that led up to it, Santa always takes a vacation somewhere sunny and warm. As a reward for helping bring joy to children around the world, Santa takes his hardest working team of elves with him!

Can you lead your team of elves to claim their well-deserved reward? Not only are there toys to be built, but reindeer to be tended and coal to be mined (sadly, not all the children are on the "nice" list). Candy canes and gingerbread houses are nice, but by working hard-and smartly-you and your team of elves may find yourselves on a beach drinking something with an umbrella in it.

A worker-placement game, taking place over 9 rounds, players use their elves to collect materials in order to build gifts, and tend to the reindeer. Players may customize their workforce by sending elves to be trained in certain aspects of the game, which provide a benefit for the rest of the game. For some gifts, plastic may be substituted for the standard materials of fabric, wood or metal. This will cause those gifts to score fewer "Christmas Cookies", but may allow a player to build more gifts in a shorter amount of time. This can be helpful when Santa comes around 3 times during the game for an inspection, to see which team has made the most gifts.

Players will have to decide when to visit the mail room in order to pick which gifts to build, and when to tend to the reindeer. The reindeer accumulate points the longer they go untended - and each of the eight reindeer provides a unique bonus to the player.